If you are a local, it’s nearly guaranteed that someone you know will light up with joy remembering Miye Tachihara Ota and The Cultural School, which she created with her husband, Ken. It was a Goleta institution for 57 years that taught both ballroom dancing and the martial arts of aikido with ki and judo under a multi-tiered chandelier. Miye left us on September 16, 2024, at 106 years old.
Miye had a tremendous impact on our community. Generations of students made forever friendships and spent hours at the dojo being a part of the Ota family’s world. Some of us met our life partners, sparked lifelong passions, and created amazing, happy memories with a lot of laughter and good times. She was a mom and a grandma to so many.
Miye was the visionary, the engine, and the marketing guru of The Cultural School. She also worked hard to ensure her and Ken’s unique skills, values, and gifts were shared generously. She met parents as they dropped off their kids, she thought of new ways to showcase her beloved students, and she spent hours making food for galas, award nights, and exhibition nights. This spirit was something Miye began developing early in her life, when her father broke with Japanese tradition and encouraged his daughter to be her own person.
Miye was born Miyeko Tachihara on August 26, 1918, in the small farming community of Oso Flaco, California. Her mother, Hatsuki Miyamoto, was a “picture bride” from Japan who married her father, Masayoshi Tachihara, who left Japan to be an independent entrepreneur. Her home was just a few feet from Oso Flaco Lake on land her father leased and worked hard to clear and make tillable for sugar beets. Miye looked up to her father with deep respect.
Their neighboring farmers were Mexican, Portuguese, and other cultures. Miye always had fond memories of her neighbors and family friends.
California’s Alien Land Law had passed in 1913, excluding “undesirable” aliens, especially Japanese people, from becoming citizens or owning land. The growing family was chased off the land they leased before Miye was 5 years old and had two siblings, Hama and Ben. The family moved to Los Angeles, where her father started a grocery store, but they soon moved to a farming community in Utah.
The family eventually settled back in Guadalupe, California, and added four more children — John, Sam, Sueko, and Joyce Sumiko. Miye was a promising student and athlete at Santa Maria High School, involved in hockey, baseball, basketball, track, and ballroom dancing. After high school, Miye attended beauty school and worked in San Diego for a successful Japanese salon owner.
Miye had moved back to Guadalupe to help her parents with the kids and household when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941. A few days later, the authorities hauled her father off to Bismarck, North Dakota, and not long after, he died of valley fever. The family ended up at an internment camp in Gila River, Arizona.
At camp, Miye cut hair, started a Girl Scout group, taught ballroom dancing, and took dance lessons from Yuriko Amemiya, who later joined the Martha Graham troupe. Miye also met the love of her life, Kenji Ota. In 1944, Miye joined Ken in Philadelphia, where he was working as a machinist, and they were married.
By 1945, one of the Philadelphia newspapers was writing about Miye’s successful beauty shop: “To Mrs. Tachihara Ota goes the credit for starting the first evacuee-owned business in this city. The beauty shop, which she opened early in January, has been keeping her so busy that she has not had enough free time to accept an offer to teach beauty culture at one of Philadelphia’s biggest beauty schools.”
A few years later, Miye returned to Santa Barbara County with Ken, where, soon after, Miye identified a piece of land for a new beauty shop. Ken had his doubts, calling it “just a wide space in the road,” in what is now Old Town Goleta. But Miye knew she would thrive. She worked late hours at her fully booked salon, with customers who included the wives of many well-known families — Hollister, Bishop, Devereux, and Giordano, to name a few.
In 1948, when Miye was 30, she gave birth to her son, Steve, and with Ken built a simple house “brick by brick” behind the beauty shop. Miye was the family’s primary breadwinner, while Ken worked as a gardener and then a machinist. Miye was a cofounder of the Goleta Chamber of Commerce, which helped put Goleta businesses on the map.
Miye’s next success was when she and Ken became champion ballroom dancers, which they accomplished after many lessons at the Arthur Murray Dance Studio. They also opened their dance and martial arts school, first teaching their high-school son and his friends judo and cotillion. Ken was a judo master and Miye was on her way to a black belt when they decided to master aikido and ki. These became their primary martial arts, with both attaining black-belt status. In 1964, when Miye was 46, they built the large studio that served as both a dojo by day and a dance floor by night.
As demand for lessons increased, Miye’s beauty shop became secondary income to their passion for learning and teaching aikido and ki. They drove south for seminars and hosted aikido masters at their dojo.
Miye formalized a curriculum in etiquette, and soon they branded their diverse community offerings as The Cultural School. It grew and thrived with hundreds of students coming through their doors, participating in parades and field trips, building their students into community leaders. The Otas also taught cotillion at the Music Academy of the West for 17 years, and dancing and martial arts at UC Santa Barbara for decades.
Ken died in 2015, and Steve continued the legacy until he passed away in 2020 with Miye by his side. The Cultural School shut its doors in 2021 to allow Miye to be well cared for in the last chapter of her long and amazing life.
Her work, and Ken’s, didn’t go unnoticed: In 2000, Ken and Miye were named a Goleta Pioneer Family. In 2018, when she turned 100 years old, Miye received the Woman of the Year award from the Goleta Chamber of Commerce for her dedication to the community and entrepreneurial spirit. In 2023, at 105, Miye was a guest of honor at a S.B. County Genealogical Society event where her history was showcased.
During her last years, Miye still made magic happen. She lived at Casa Los Padres with a compassionate and loving crew of caregivers. Every time you visited her, Miye was filled with gratitude, never complained, made funny jokes, and insisted you give her your hand so she could give you a healing massage with ki. She had incredible recollections of specific memories, and until the very end, she had an open and loving heart filled with so much peace. Miye lives on in our hearts and spirits.
For those interested in sharing stories and giving thanks, a gathering is planned for Tucker’s Grove Park on November 17. Details are at the Facebook event listing: facebook.com/events/568365435631997. You may also email your story to be read at the event: sara.erickson.2013@gmail.com.